Conflagration
by Dandy in the Aspic
Summary: This is the way a human is destroyed, giving all to a war that doesn't give back. ME3 for Logan Shepard. Warning: AU, Renegade Shepard, darkfic, dark themes, major character death.


This is very different from my usual stuff and not a headcanon of mine. This features my only broshep. It is an experiment, really.

* * *

There's a Reaper horn and even though the song says not to fear the Reaper, Shepard fears it; he fears it in his dreams, in the shower, when he shuts his eyelids and remembers the burn of no oxygen. Thessia falls and more rage follows the fear, slick and oily like that time he had seen his Pa cut open the belly of a cow on Mindoir and its guts had slid out, so wetly, so easily. They had shined in the sun. Logan Shepard thinks that Reaper shells shine too, like monstrous beetle carapaces.

He tries to fuck Ash that night, but the stink of failure oozes from his pores, the stink of millions dead asari. He can't do it, he rolls off of her, both unsatisfied. He tells her she should go, ignores the hurt look on her face, and once she's gone, he takes a hit of Red Sand. Logan thinks he loved her once, when they were younger, when Alenko wasn't dead and Logan had never know exactly what waited in the great beyond – gaping maws of nothing.

He was going to quit three years ago, before Eden Prime. Somehow he doesn't think he will live long enough to worry about the long-term effects. Anderson suspected, Logan thought the SR1 posting was his last ditch attempt at setting him straight, something for Logan to fight for. Anderson is stuck on Earth now, and Logan can't hear his advice.

Fuck it, he does enough for the galaxy. A little Red Sand is harmless, he is not a biotic, it's not like it would stroke out an implant. He takes a shower, finishes what he and Ash started and feels dirty. Then he goes down to the med bay and bullies a sedative out of Doctor Michel.

He sleeps then, and dreams of melting in a pod. Oozing towards a human Reaper, a fetus of machine gods and he is their oil.

The next morning they find James hung in the cargo bay. His neck is bent grotesquely, beefy tendons stretched and bulging like his muscles. His hazel eyes are wide and staring and so empty. Tali finds him first and won't stop screaming, Logan tells Garrus to handle it. He can't stand that screaming, it's worse than the sight of James' body.

They can't afford to stop and bury him, so Logan takes Javik's advice and throws him out of the airlock.

Ashes to ashes, space dust to space dust, right?

That night when Logan goes back to his room, there is a little dinosaur figurine waiting on his bed side table. He touches it, picks it up. It's very green, its teeth bared in a snarl. It's stupid and childish and on the bottom of its clawed feet 'James' is scrawled crudely.

Logan lies down clutching that little dinosaur, and carefully closes his eyes. There's a Reaper horn somewhere in the darkness behind his eyes. The darkness cannot be breached.

When they reach the Citadel next, Logan goes into Purgatory and drinks. He drinks until it bubbles out of his mouth again, until his bright green eyes are glassy, until when he gets a blowjob in the bathrooms from a stranger who wants to 'thank' Commander Shepard. He can't even feel it he is so wasted. Instead he throws up in her hair.

On the walk back to the ship he deliberately treks through the rough section of the Ward, and two batarians accost him. He snaps their necks, fries their skin with his omni-tool and leaves them rotting in the alley. C-SEC would take care of it. In war, people turned on each other like feral animals, this is not so unusual. Even drunk he can kill, he was not the Butcher of Torfan for nothing.

In his room he is not so drunk to miss the new figurine sitting by his bed side. It's a miniature sniper rifle. It's perfectly crafted and if Logan didn't know better he would say it was a children's toy from Palaven.

They find Garrus striped of his plating, ripped from his armor like a de-shelled turtle the next day. There's a lot of blue blood on the walls in the battery. EDI had been disabled by expert hacking, silenced and somehow blinded in the night.

There's a Reaper horn, in Logan's head. The crew is afraid. One of them has cracked, Garrus didn't kill himself and now there is doubt if James did.

A fear kindles in Logan's heart.


End file.
